Yesterday, in paid advertisements in some traditional newspapers and online, Tonye Timi, Deputy Director, Media & Publicity of the APC Campaign Organisation, who recently sought greener pastures in the camp of the Deputy Senate President, Ovie Omo-Agege, the defeated candidate of the All Progressives Congress, in the March 18th governorship election in Delta State, wrote: MIDENO BAYAGBON AND FRED LATIMORE AS SLUMDOGS SEEKING NEW JOBS WITH A MAN OF THE STREET.
In it he accused Mideno Bayagbon of being among a coterie of media rookies, trampling bogeymen and a hatchet writer, who are desperately angling to be appointed to manage the media portfolio of the Governor -elect of Delta State, the Rt. Hon Sheriff Oborevwori. He said: “Mideno Bayagbon, Fred Latimore Oghenesivbe are already masturbating over the possibilities of new jobs and new titles” and so many other inanities.
Many of us have known Timi Tonye for close to 20 years. In all of that time, he has not failed to impress as one who would go to any length, do anything, to curry favours of his targeted political benefactors. He has made hanging around the perimeters of power in Asaba his sole occupation. A paper weight in Ijaw and Delta State politics, he is currently trying his best to ingratiate himself to the Deputy Senate President, Ovie Omo-Agege, who was trounced silly in the March 18th governorship election in Delta State by Sheriff Oborevwori.
With no appointment or patronage from the Governor Ifeanyi Okowa government in the last four years (apart from being appointed as a member of a reconciliation committee to Isoko land), and with the calculation that Chief James Ibori’s anointed candidate will eventually get the ticket, he easily defected. When that prospect dimmed, he swallowed his own vomit and sought economic refuge in the camp of Ovie Omo-Agege, a man, who before now, he had no respects for and spoke about disparagingly. Even now, when he is not within earshot of his new principal, he has no kind words. There are copious evidences.
No doubt, it is his right to associate with whomever and wherever he feels his political and economic fortunes can be buttered. That has been his operating mode over the years. Lacking character, reliability and stability, Timi Tonye is a man with no known pedigree. You are his friend when you can help push his economic and political interest. For now, he sees Omo-Agege as his next meal ticket. Give him one year of no appointment and no patronage, Omo-Agege will automatically incur his wrath even as he stealthily schemes to return to the PDP.
So when he made grandiose accusations in his ill digested diatribe, apparently in reply to Bayagbon’s article last week: “Why and How Ovie Omo-Agege lost in Delta State”, he was only displaying what he has over the years come to be known for: desperation, lack of integrity and low quality, of what is now commonly known in Nigerian parlance as anywhere belly face politics.
In the said article, Bayagbon had dispassionately examined the reasons Senator Ovie Omo-Agege did not and could not have won the elections. One of these reasons is that light weight politicians, like Timi Tonye, who have no grassroots support, scammed him into thinking they have political capital. Most of them failed woefully to win their units and wards, not to talk of their local government areas. In Patani, where he is from, he is seen as inconsequential and of no electoral value. Those who matter at the grassroots there delivered Patani local government to the PDP.
Unable to controvert the solid reasons Bayagbon adduced for his principal losing the election, Timi Tonye resorts to abuses and insults which speaks volume of the content of his persona and character quotient. Why not speak to the issues and points raised?
Timi’s height of arrogance knows no limit. He arrogates to himself the right to decide for Bayagbon who to support in the politics of Delta State. He luxuriates in his own self-importance while parading voluminous, ignoble ignorance.
For someone whose livelihood revolves around hanging around Asaba and scrounging on his wife and others, how can he deride a man who has a second class upper degree and Master’s degree in political science as someone who can’t read or write? How can he gleefully say this of a man who for the past six years has been the Speaker of the Delta State House of Assembly? Why does he laugh at the fact that Sheriff describes himself as a man with excessive local content, as a man of the people, as street wise? They tried painting him as an “uncertificated illiterate” What arrant nonsense!
Timi Tonye attempts to unleash the same lie-lie campaign strategy they used in de-marketing the PDP Governor-elect on Bayagbon in his puerile advertisement. He classifies him as a rookie media man, as a bogey man, a hatchet writer. If stating the unvarnished truth makes Bayagbon any of these in the Lilliputian estimation of this anywhere belly face lackey, he should be left to the court of public opinion to judge. Timi Tonye knows that Bayagbo has been one of the nation’s media icons in the last 30 years. He not only edited Vanguard newspapers, he publishes one of the most highly rated online newspapers: www.thenewsguru.ng. A syndicated columnist over the years, Bayagbon is an adjunct mass communication lecturer, an entrepreneur who runs his businesses in Nigeria and internationally. Unlike him, Bayagbon does not need any political appointment nor depend on his wife nor be a Yes Sir man, to make ends meet. God has blessed him phenomenally.
In Bayagbon’s article of 25th March, 2023, he wrote: “For one who has shied away from getting actively involved in Nigerian politics, someone who had rejected all political appointments and had privately vowed, long ago, not to get entangled in it, I am sorry to report I got lured, tempted beyond self interest and found myself in the steamy, sweaty room of this seemingly demonic Nigerian enclave. I temporarily, finally, decided to throw aside the cloak of non-partisanship, and taste, first hand, Nigerian politics in all its glorious and gory dimensions. I got myself swamped in the small, troubled and dirty pond of Delta State politics. What an eye opener it turned out to be. But no, I didn’t fall in love with it.”
Bayagbon had also said: “Those who know me know that once I put my heart and mind into something, I will always side with the oppressed. So it was a given that I will take the side of the badly maligned Sheriff Oborevwori, the street wise guy who by a dint of divine favour, serious hard work and focus rose from the streets of Effurun and Osubi village to be Governor-Elect of Delta State two days back.” It was the perfidy being displayed, the gamut of concocted lies, and the attempt to harangue and demonise the man who lives among the people, that got Bayagbon miffed and propelled him into rendering his support to him.
Let us for a moment even assume, but not concede, that Bayagbon was interested in political appointment under the Delta State Governor-elect. First, it is his right to so aspire as a citizen of the state. But as stated above, he did not go temporarily into Delta State politics because he wanted to be a Chief Press Secretary or Commissioner. These are positions he constantly rejected since the Government of the late Air Commodore Ibrahim Kefas and the late Olorogun Felix Ibru. Even appointments at the federal level were constantly rejected by him unlike Timi Tonye who hankers after such, whose very existence depends on being a lackey. Many know that Bayagbon was his run-to man most times in the past. He helped him to get appointments and also lobbied for him to be a House of Representative candidate, which true to type, flunked. Because he is in dire financial straits, he resorts to lies so glaringly. What insufferable audacity; what a pitiable character.
But then, devoid of any other source of livelihood, he is trying to please his paymaster while hoping that some crumbs will fall from the APC government at the centre when Asiwaju Bola Tinubu gets sworn in. Timi Tonye’s type of genuflecting politicians we all know, are the major problem with Nigerian politics.
